Digital And Print Photography

Digital and Print Photography: More Alike than Different

There is a slight language barrier of techniques between digital and print photography but going from film to digital shouldn’t that difficult. Once you understand the differences you’ll learn that digital and print photography produce similar results.

With print photography, you put film in your camera, took pictures, and pretty much lived with the results. While you could control many aspects of the picture you had to wait for the pictures to be developed before you knew whether they came out as planned.

Print photography film comes in a variety of “speeds” which was the ability of the film to gather light. Anywhere from 32 ASA, for bright lighting conditions, up to 1600 ASA for low light is available. It also comes in a variety of sizes, with 35mm being the most popular, and 2”x 2” being favored among professionals. Planning for very large prints usually teams a 2”x 2” film negative with the lower ASA film to provide unsurpassed clarity and sharp images.

Similar choices are available in digital and print photography but the terms are different. Instead of film speed, we refer to image resolution in digital language. Pixels per inch, known as PPI, tells us how sharp the image will appear on the computer screen. This is important if you’re going to save the pictures onto a CD to hand out to others to see. You’ll want the pictures to be sharp.

In digital and print photography the picture may appear “grainy” if the wrong (too high) film speed was used or a lesser PPI was used. Ideally professional film photographers won’t use film over 100 ASA. Professional digital photographers usually use 600 PPI but screen resolutions of 300 PPI are adequate for viewing on a screen.

For larger-print pictures, professional digital and print photography requires better grades in the resolution used. It’s not unusual for large prints to be made with 32 ASA film or with a DPI (dots per inch) of a minimum of 600. Although a 1024 x 1024 resolution is about the best you can get, it requires a vast amount of memory and the difference to the human eye may be minimal.

Where the printing paper is concerned, all things are created equal. From satin finish to high gloss all grades of paper are available for digital and print photography. How the paper is printed is the big difference. Placing it into your computer’s printer and printing it basically the same way as your everyday letters is how it’s done digitally, but print photography requires passing the film through a series of liquid chemical baths. Digital printing paper is not sensitive to light and can be kept on your desk. Print photography paper is light sensitive and must remain in total darkness until used. But with the quality of paper the difference between a digital and print photography enlargement is hard to see.